I wish to give people an opportunity to share their experiences of how they came to be receptive to the ideas presented in this website, as well any value they have derived from this website. If you would like to have your ideas presented alongside mine in the “testimonials” section feel free to email them to me at dmackler58@aol.com. Alternatively, feel free to sign into the guestbook and share your comments there.

Testimonial #1: by Daniel Mackler, creator of iraresoul.com

I am fairly certain I saw Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child around my home as a child – probably belonging to my mother – but as with most adult psychology books, I wasn’t much interested. I didn’t actually read The Drama of the Gifted Child until the summer of 1999 – when I was in my late-20s – and I picked it up rather by chance. At that point I was entering graduate school and was about to begin work as a therapist, and despite having already done a huge amount of inner psychological exploration by that point, I still hadn’t read too much psychology. I felt that if I was going to become a therapist it was only appropriate that I started reading up on the field.

So I went to my local library in New York City and perused the psychology stacks, hoping to find something interesting. The first book I pulled out was The Drama of the Gifted Child, and I brought it home and read it. I found it fairly good, but I thought to myself, “Yeah, it’s pretty good – but this stuff is pretty obvious, and I know it all already.” I returned it to the library and didn’t think much more about Miller for about a year.

In that intervening year I read many more psychology books, and found them mostly atrocious. I also began work as a therapist, and discovered that almost everyone I came into contact with in the mental health field – professors, supervisors, fellow students, and other therapists – were downright primitive, and mostly radically in denial when it came to seeing the effects (and often the existence) of childhood trauma. The only people I really felt were telling the truth were my patients – who at that time were all traumatized Vietnam combat veterans. I did, however, read, Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, and found that largely excellent.

I quickly became disenchanted with the psychology field – with one exception: I absolutely LOVED being a therapist. After I finished my first year of work with veterans, I began working on a psychiatric ward for women with eating disorders and for people with severe depression who were receiving electroshock therapy. The whole experience was hell – though extremely enlightening. Now I saw the true horror of the mental health field. Therapy on the psych ward – at the “esteemed” New York State Psychiatric Institute – was a joke, and no one took childhood trauma seriously, despite the fact that behind my closed doors most of my patients told stories of severe childhood trauma, including incest, violence, and deprivation. But my colleagues reduced everything to biological causes and biological treatments. Medication was king.

Remembering Drama of the Gifted Child, I returned to reading Alice Miller, first Thou Shalt Not Be Aware and then For Your Own Good, and suddenly I realized her value: she was a downright maverick in the psychology field. She had clearly confronted the same psychological idiocy and blindness amongst her colleagues that I was finding among mine – and had written about it! Suddenly I had an ally, and she became my hero. (I even wrote to her a couple of times, but she never answered.) That said, I had a few niggling suspicions about her, things I didn’t quite like, but in light of the value she was providing me as an ally and a witness in the bowels of mental health hell, I didn’t care. Alice Miller was God.

However, none of my colleagues were even curious about what she had to say. Nor were my professors or fellow students in graduate school. That said, I had one friend in my personal life who had read her, and he and I talked about her at length, which helped. But aside from him I was on my own.

Meanwhile, I remember anytime I would read a new psychology book by a different author – or even when I considered buying a new psychology book – I would assess its value by looking up “Alice Miller” in the index. Occasionally I found her there. Mostly it was just some silly and content-devoid reference to The Drama of the Gifted Child, which was better than nothing, though from time to time I found an author who was clearly in massive denial of childhood trauma and took a stab at her and criticized her as being unfounded in her ideas. But the far majority of psychology writers just ignored her completely – and didn’t reference her at all. It was as if she – and childhood trauma – simply didn’t exist. How convenient.

In the years 2000 and 2001 I read everything Alice Miller published, and tons of stuff by her and about her on the internet. I even wrote a few book reviews about her works on amazon.com – though they were largely uncritical reviews. She was still my hero – as she still is to some degree. But things were beginning to shift for me.

By early 2001 I was working fulltime as a paid therapist, graduate school was over, and I had become much more independent. I was seeing thirty or forty patients a week in outpatient therapy – in a not-for-profit clinic in New York City – and I felt quite confident in my abilities. I found that I didn’t need Alice Miller’s support as much as I had in the past – mostly because I’d internalized it and integrated it into my personality. It was then that I found myself in a safer position to study her more objectively – even to criticize certain aspects of her work and point of view. I was troubled that her ideas hadn’t developed much after the publication of her first three books (from the early 1980s), and when I read her website I found it much more primitive than her writings of twenty years earlier. Also, I started sensing that she was playing the guru card, and encouraged others who shared her blindnesses – and often attacked or shunned those who didn’t.

At this point I became very curious what others had written in criticism of her – and I began a search to track down their writings. To my dismay, I found nothing, or I should say, nothing of value. Yes, there was some critical writing about her, but these authors were so obviously in profound denial of their own childhood histories that their criticisms were a joke, though a scary joke when you consider that most of them were “experts” with PhDs or MDs. On the flip side, most of what everyone else wrote about her was so blindly praising, to the point of sycophantic, that it too was useless.

I felt very alone with my rudimentary criticisms of her work – such as of her tacit approval for not-fully-healed parents to have children, which was a set-up for abuse – and I didn’t know where to turn. So I turned to myself. I looked within – and began to trust myself even more. I continued working as a therapist for a few more years, transitioning into private practice, and eventually, in mid-2004, I took a shot at writing some of my own criticisms of Alice Miller. The piece I wrote wasn’t too long, but in encapsulated my ideas about her, and I realized I had created something very new – and I realized I needed to share it with the world. So I decided to set up a website – www.iraresoul.com. (That originally stood for “Institute for the Rare Soul,” though the “Institute” never really materialized.) I started fleshing out the rest of my point of view in essay form, and I put it up in the summer of 2004.

I had no idea how to get traffic to the site, because I knew almost no one who was remotely interested in my ideas, so I joined several psychology web forums and shared my ideas there. Mostly they hated what I had to say, but a lot of people did check out my website, even if they criticized the hell out of it. I got a lot of hate mail from them – mostly anonymous – which was scary, but in an odd way fascinating. (I even got a few hostile – and anonymous – telephone calls, as I had my phone number on the site.) I’d spent most of my life trying to fit in and get along, and this was new. I’d never before been public about any of my radical ideas.

For a time, though, the fear I experienced became too much for me and I made myself anonymous on iraresoul.com, calling myself “Truthtraveler.” This was comfortable for many reasons. First and foremost was that my true ideas could be hidden from my colleagues – and even from my patients. (I have since noticed that an extremely miniscule percentage of therapists who have websites share much content on them – much less content of value. The standard way to make a therapy website is to make it brief, positive, uplifting, nurturing, general, and vapid. Original ideas are a big no-no: they just turn off potential clients, who are mostly looking for comfortable support – not a challenge to their core beliefs!)

It was unpleasant to be rejected because of my point of view, and it happened a lot. Most of my colleagues who read my website thought I was a freak. Some even told me so to my face. I was accused of trying to start a cult, of being pathologically consumed in my own history of childhood trauma, of unconsciously trying to sabotage my therapy practice, even of being masochistic. And certainly they didn’t refer patients to me anymore! Hiding behind “Truthtraveler” made things easier. I even slept better at night. (But at the same time I lived in fear that people would find out who I was and publicly “out” me. And some people did find out, either through hunting down old archives of my website, or by searching into the ownership of iraresoul.com – which had my name on it!)

Somehow my therapy practice kept its head above water, and I didn’t go under. And I kept thinking about Alice Miller, and kept hunting for other reasonable criticisms, and found nothing. In mid-2006 I decided to take the plunge and write a full-scale, serious review of Alice Miller and her work. I worked on it for a hefty chunk of time, and started by re-reading everything she had published up to that point – and a lot of her internet writings as well. When I completed the piece, all 16,000 words of it, I wondered what to do with it. I felt it was powerful, and I felt like I would be selling myself short to publish it under the name Truthtraveler. So I decided to change my website back to my real name. It was terrifying, but I felt it necessary.

That was over two years ago, and I have no regrets. Despite the fears and discomfort of being associated with radical ideas that cause me to be rejected by most of the norm, I have received benefits from my website – and particularly from that Alice Miller essay – that have been invaluable. I have met incredible and likeminded friends through it, new colleagues who don’t bury their heads in the sands of denial, and I have even gotten connected with some amazing new patients. Yes, generally the majority of my present-day colleagues mostly ignore my ideas, but what I have come to realize is that it’s not my ideas they’re really ignoring, but their own childhoods – and their childhood pain. And there’s nothing I can do to change that.

All I can do is keep on writing, keep on exploring my own childhood, and keep on growing!